Year in review: national politics in 2009 (part 1)

It took me a week longer than I anticipated, but I finally finished compiling links to Bleeding Heartland’s coverage from last year. This post and part 2, coming later today, include stories on national politics, mostly relating to Congress and Barack Obama’s administration. Diaries reviewing Iowa politics in 2009 will come soon.

One thing struck me while compiling this post: on all of the House bills I covered here during 2009, Democrats Leonard Boswell, Bruce Braley and Dave Loebsack voted the same way. That was a big change from 2007 and 2008, when Blue Dog Boswell voted with Republicans and against the majority of the Democratic caucus on many key bills.

No federal policy issue inspired more posts last year than health care reform. Rereading my earlier, guardedly hopeful pieces was depressing in light of the mess the health care reform bill has become. I was never optimistic about getting a strong public health insurance option through Congress, but I thought we had a chance to pass a very good bill. If I had anticipated the magnitude of the Democratic sellout on so many aspects of reform in addition to the public option, I wouldn’t have spent so many hours writing about this issue. I can’t say I wasn’t warned (and warned), though.

Links to stories from January through June 2009 are after the jump. Any thoughts about last year’s political events are welcome in this thread.

The four Democratic governors who got to appoint new senators didn’t handle the task very well. Senator Russ Feingold had a better idea, proposing a constitutional amendment to require elections to fill vacant Senate seats.

The House approved the stimulus bill, and Iowa’s representatives split on party lines. Tom Harkin said he wasn’t a “happy camper” and that Democratic leaders had reduced valuable spending in order to spend more money on fixing the alternative minimum tax, which “has nothing to do with stimulus.”

George W. Bush ranked 36th out of the 42 American presidents, in the collective opinion of 65 professional historians or observers of the presidency. I felt it was unfair for Bush to be ranked ahead of William Henry Harrison.

Progressive bloggers formed the Accountability Now PAC to “recruit, coordinate, and support primary challenges against vulnerable Congressional incumbents who have become more responsive to corporate America than to their constituents.”

A national poll by Hart Research Associates found that “An overwhelming majority of Americans believe restoring existing roads and bridges and expanding transportation options should take precedence over building new roads […].”

President Obama proposed reforms to the Congressional earmarking process, and I gave background on the failure of Democratic leadership that led to Tom Harkin’s $1.8 million earmark for studying odors from large hog confinements (CAFOs) in Iowa. That earmark that became a poster child for Republican outrage over wasteful spending.

Food Democracy Now advocated changes to current rules, which allow “large corporate farms to take advantage of [federal] subsidy loopholes that place independent family farmers at a serious competitive disadvantage.”

News emerged that “The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year […].”

House Republican leader John Boehner asked why anyone would want a government-run health care plan to jeopardize “the greatest health-care delivery system in the world”? I provided ten answers to his question.

Chuck Grassley said he couldn’t recall or find any record explaining why he voted against confirming Sonia Sotomayor to the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in 1998. My hunch is that like other Republicans, he didn’t want Sotomayor to be in line for the Supreme Court.

The Project on Government Oversight reviewed state websites, looking for resources for those who want to report fraud, waste and abuse in how federal stimulus funds are being used. Iowa’s website on the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act scored well in the report but wasn’t in the top tier of especially “whistleblower-friendly websites.”